Gérard Mourou

Gérard Mourou

Professor Gérard Mourou was the founding Director of the Center for Ultrafast Optical Science at the University of Michigan. For forty years, Professor Gérard Mourou has pioneered the field of ultrafast lasers and their applications in scientific, engineering and medical disciplines. He is also the initiator of the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) in Europe. With his student Donna Strickland he is the inventor of the Chirped Pulses Amplification (CPA) technique which allowed for amplifying ultrashort laser pulses to very high optical powers (presently Petawatt) with the laser pulse being stretched out temporally and spectrally prior to amplification. He has been the recipient of the Wood Prize from The Optical Society, the Edgerton Prize from the SPIE, the Sarnoff Prize from the IEEE, and the 2004 IEEE/LEOS Quantum Electronics Award. He is a fellow of The Optical Society and a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Professor Mourou is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Currently he is Distinguished Professor Emeritus from the University of Michigan and the Ecole polytechnique in Palaiseau France.

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Researchers have developed a way to use commercial inkjet printers and readily available ink to print hidden images that are only visible when illuminated with appropriately polarized waves in the terahertz region of the electromagnetic spectrum. The inexpensive method could be used as a type of invisible ink to hide information in otherwise normal-looking images, making it possible to distinguish between authentic and counterfeit items, for example.

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